Bully
Boston, Massachusetts, 1987
In the school auditorium,
the Theodore Roosevelt statue
is nostalgic
5for the Spanish-American War,
each fist lonely for a saber,
or the reins of anguish-eyed horses,
or a podium to clatter with speeches
glorying in the malaria of conquest.
But now the Roosevelt school
10is pronounced Hernández.
Puerto Rico has invaded Roosevelt
with its army of Spanish-singing children
in the hallways,
brown children devouring
15the stockpiles of the cafeteria,
children painting Taáno ancestors
that leap naked across murals.
Roosevelt is surrounded
20by all the faces
he ever shoved in eugenic spite
and cursed as mongrels, skin of one race,
hair and cheekbones of another.
Once Marines tramped
from the newsreel of his imagination;
25now children plot to spray graffiti
in parrot-brilliant colors across the Victorian mustache
and monocle.